Uncle Rudy used to be New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani long before becoming President Trump’s lawyer. What a difference 17 years makes. The commanding leader who helped America navigate the horror of 9/11 is again making the TV rounds, but this time he seems to be speaking English as a second language.
.. On CNN, Giuliani had talked about a pre-meeting of Trump aides to discuss a strategy for the infamous June 9, 2016, meeting that took place a few days later at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and members of a Russian delegation.
.. But, apparently, there was no such pre-meeting, Giuliani tried to explain on “Outnumbered.” He said he had heard about it from reporters, who had apparently heard about it from Michael Cohen
.. Giuliani said he’d only brought up the pretend pre-meeting because he was trying to get ahead of the story. (Believe me, I’m making this easy for you.)
.. Cohen is reportedly prepared to tell Mueller that the president knew ahead of time about the June 9 meeting, which, if true, could suggest collusion with the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 election. Unless Cohen or someone else can provide corroborating evidence, then Trump’s denial stands.
.. Giuliani scoffed at the notion that Trump knew of the meeting, and the attorney added that he doesn’t believe collusion is against the law. “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” he said during the “Fox & Friends” interview. “Collusion is not a crime.”
Later on CNN, he said, “I don’t even know if that’s a crime — colluding with Russians. Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking.”
.. But, as lawyer Giuliani surely knows, conspiracy to defraud the United States, if found to be the case, would be a criminal offense under 18 U.S.C. 371.
.. If Nixon knew in advance of the burglary, then he’d have been at least a co-conspirator, if not an accessory to the crime. It has never been conclusively established that he did know beforehand, though he certainly did lie and participate in an attempted coverup.
.. If Nixon knew in advance of the burglary, then he’d have been at least a co-conspirator, if not an accessory to the crime. It has never been conclusively established that he did know beforehand, though he certainly did lie and participate in an attempted coverup.
No collusion! Oh, wait — maybe collusion!
there’s a great value to Giuliani’s appearances. They tell us what the president is thinking about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Russia scandal — and what he’s afraid of.
.. Four months, they’re not going to be colluding about Russians, which I’m not even [sure] if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians. You start analyzing the crime, the hacking is the crime, the hacking is the crime. Well, the president didn’t hack! He didn’t pay them for hacking!
.. I’ve been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find “collusion” as a crime. Collusion is not a crime.
.. In a very strict sense, Giuliani is right that there isn’t a particular crime called “collusion.” But that’s kind of like saying that if you walked into an Apple Store, stuffed an iPhone in your pants and walked out, you’re innocent because the criminal code makes no specific reference to “stuffing an iPhone in your pants.”
.. Now it’s possible that Trump himself, or someone on the Trump campaign, could have “colluded” with Russia to commit an act that is not illegal and, therefore, they wouldn’t be guilty of any crime. For instance, they could have colluded to find the best taco truck in Manhattan. They could even have discussed some kind of policy initiative that they would cooperatively pursue if Trump became president. But the real problem with the “collusion is not a crime” argument is that if they cooperated to do almost anything that helped Trump in his election campaign, then it would have been illegal.
.. there are multiple crimes under which any cooperation between the Russian government and the Trump campaign could potentially fall. If the campaign sought and/or received damaging information on its opponent from sources connected to the Russian government, it would almost certainly be in violation of this statute, which prohibits “a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution” from a foreign national for the purpose of a political campaign. A contribution could be money, but it could also be any other “thing of value,” and dirt on your opponent would seem to qualify. In addition to the crime of accepting the contribution, they could also be charged with conspiracy to violate election laws, or with aiding and abetting another person’s crime.
.. the Trump defense on Russia has gone through numerous iterations, ranging from outright lies to laughable assertions.
- First they said nobody on the campaign ever talked to any Russians.
- Then they said they may have talked to Russians but didn’t have any planned meetings.
- Then they said that they had a planned meeting with Russians but didn’t collude with Russians.
- And now they’re saying that even if they did collude with Russians, that’s okay because collusion isn’t a crime.
.. let’s remember that two days before the meeting with the Russians, which would be June 7, 2016, is also when Trump told a crowd, “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.” After the Russian meeting was a bust, his “major speech” laying out Clinton dirt never took place.
.. It’s possible on one hand that nothing happened at the June 7 meeting or, on the other hand, that the participants all agreed that Trump was being kept up to date about the whole thing. If Rick Gates (Paul Manafort’s deputy) was there, we could find out, because he’s now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
Trump lawyer Giuliani says special counsel Robert Mueller is bluffing
Trump’s current thinking, per Giuliani (and Axios), is that enough is enough:
‘It’s like a guy playing poker. [Mueller is] bluffing, and he’s only got a pair of twos.’
Rudy Giuliani
The reason Mueller, whose investigation has led to indictments of or guilty pleas by 32 individuals and three commercial enterprises, won’t show his cards by producing a summary report, Giuliani reportedly tells Axios, is that he does not “have a goddamn thing.”
The Don and His Badfellas
The Trumps have often been compared to a mob family. Certainly, in the White House, they have created a dark alternative universe with an inverted ethical code, where the main value is loyalty to the godfather above all else.
An anti-Trump group called Mad Dog PAC has a billboard reading: “MAGA, Mobsters Are Governing America.”
.. As Michael Daly noted in The Daily Beast, “Traditionally, rats begin wearing a wire after they get jammed up.”
.. In the taped call, Cohen tells Trump that he has talked to the mogul’s trusted money manager and “Apprentice” guest star, Allen Weisselberg, about how to set up a company to reimburse David Pecker, the National Enquirer owner, for buying off Trump goomah Karen McDougal. Federal investigators in Manhattan now want to interview Weisselberg.
“Long term, this could be the most damaging,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me, “because it gets into Trump’s wallet.”
.. Cohen the Fixer claims Trump knew about the Russian meeting during the campaign with his son and Paul Manafort. The president hit the mattresses on Twitter, denying it all.
.. Rudy Giuliani has somersaulted from a RICO-happy prosecutor to a man acting like a Mafia lawyer, telling Chris Cuomo that Cohen is an “incredible liar” when only three months ago he pronounced him “an honest, honorable lawyer.”
.. If the White House seems more and more like “Goodfellas,” it is not an accident.
“Trump has a very cinematic sense of himself,” O’Brien said. Like many on social media, he is driven to be the star of his own movie. He even considered going to film school in L.A. before he settled into his father’s business.
.. O’Brien recalled that Trump told him that he thought Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star. “He and Melania model their squints on Eastwood,” the biographer noted. Trump also remarked, while they were watching “Sunset Boulevard” on the Trump plane, that a particular scene was amazing: the one where Norma Desmond obsessively watches her silent films and cries: “Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them!”
.. Trump is drawn to people who know how to dominate a room and exaggerated displays of macho, citing three of his top five movies as
- “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,”
- “Goodfellas” and
- “The Godfather.”
.. As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the V.I.P. box:
- George Steinbrenner,
- Lee Iacocca,
- Frank Sinatra,
- Roy Cohn,
- Rupert Murdoch,
- Cary Grant.
He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.
.. “In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.
.. “When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad — which was the only time he got to spend with him — he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about ‘Goodfellas’ — people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn’t have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk.”
As Steve Bannon noted approvingly, Trump has a Rat Pack air, and as O’Brien said, Trump was the sort of guy who kept gold bullion in his office.
.. Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe that anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all. He’s turning America into Mulberry Street in the ’20s, where you meet your co-conspirators in the back of the candy store.”